2GQ/New Oregon advisory board guy and general swell fellow Andrew in Brooklyn sends news of this very intriguing show: "thought you might be interested in hearing about this (oregon loony bin! psychedelic mold!)..."
The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU presents LIBRARY OF DUST, an evening of talks, readings, and a short film in response to David Maisel's remarkable photographic excavation of a warehouse of ashes (of the Oregon dead) otherwise lost to time. April 13 in NYC.
Monday, April 13 at 7pm
The Angel Orensanz Foundation
172 Norfolk Street (just south of Houston)
with
Ulrich Baer, Rachel Cohen, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Karen Lang,
Jonathan Lethem, David Maisel, Geoff Manaugh, Ted Mooney,
Bill Morrison, Gilles Peress, Michael Roth,
Luc Sante, Vijay Seshadri & Lawrence Weschler
* Free and open to the public. *
"Library of Dust, from the photographer David Maisel, may well be this year's most haunting book of images. It is a collection of photographs of copper canisters, each containing the unclaimed remains of a patient from a psychiatric hospital in Oregon (the same one used for filming "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"). Rivulets of chemical corrosion, almost oceanic in their intense coloring, run down the sides. Mr. Maisel's book is a fevered meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before."
--The New York Times, November 28, 2008
The Oregon State Insane Asylum, opened in 1883 on a hill just east of Salem and renamed the Oregon State Hospital in 1913, became in part a warehouse for the state's anonymous unwanted. When residents died and went unclaimed by family, their bodies were cremated with the ashes remanded to copper canisters, which in turn themselves got warehoused. Decades passed, the canisters blossomed forth with all manner of colorful corrosions, the hospital started getting shut down, well into the process of which, around 2005, with what remained of the hospital under new leadership, the canister depot itself came to light. The photographer David Maisel rushed to the scene to compile the remarkable record that has become the book and traveling exhibition, Library of Dust. The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU decided to convene an evening of witness and response to Maisel's project at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, once among the city's first synagogues and itself one of the most magnificently evocative ruins in the region.
The evening will include talks, readings, a short film, and the projection of Maisel's Library of Dust photographs.
PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES
ULRICH BAER, Professor of German and Comparative Literature and Vice Provost for Global Programs and Multiculturalism at NYU and author, among others, of Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, and The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke. Fellow of the NYIH.
RACHEL COHEN, author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (1854-1967) and professor in the writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College. Fellow of the NYIH.
JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT, author of The Myth of Happiness; Doubt: A History; and The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France; along with two books of poetry, The Next Ancient World and Funny. Fellow of the NYIH.
KAREN LANG, associate professor at the University of Southern California with a focus on modern German art and Aesthetic Theory, author of Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History.
JONATHAN LETHEM, novelist (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, You Don't Love Me Yet, etc.) and essayist (The Disappointment Artist, Men and Cartoons, etc.). MacArthur Fellow and Fellow of the NYIH.
DAVID MAISEL, chronicler for more than twenty years of the tensions between nature and culture in his large-scaled photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes, across such series as Oblivion, Terminal Mirage, The Lake Project, and The Mining Project; and the photo-archeo-archivist behind The Library of Dust (published recently by Chronicle Books). For more, see <http://www.davidmaisel.com>www.davidmaisel.com.
GEOFF MANAUGH, creator and curator of the Bldgblog website, dedicated to architectural news and conjecture, editor of the forthcoming Bldgblog book, and contributor of the essay "Mineral Kinships" to the Library of Dust book (<http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/library-of-dust.html>http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/library-of-dust.html).
TED MOONEY, author of such novels as Easy Travel to Other Planets, Traffic and Laughter, and Singing into the Piano. Longtime senior editor at Art in America and Fellow of the NYIH.
BILL MORRISON, a member of the Ridge Theater and founder of Hypnotic Films, home for his remarkable new films crafted largely out of decaying celluloid nitrate filmstock mined from out of orphan film archives around the world, notably including his feature film Decasia.
GILLES PERESS, internationally renowned Magnum photojournalist, regular contributor among others to The New Yorker, whose work has been gathered in such books as Telex Iran; Farewell to Bosnia; The Silence (Rwanda); Power In the Blood: Photographs of the North of Ireland. He was a co-creator of Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know and is a Fellow of the NYIH.
MICHAEL ROTH, former president of the California College of the Arts, recently appointed president of Wesleyan University, author of Psycho-Analysis as History and The Ironist's Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction of History; editor of Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (out of the Getty Research Institute); and contributor of an essay on the history of insane asylums in the Library of Dust volume.
LUC SANTE, essayist whose books include Low Life; Evidence; The Factory of Facts; Walker Evans; and Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005. He translated and edited Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines for the New York Review Books (NYRB) and is a Fellow of the NYIH.
VIJAY SESHADRI is a poet (The Long Meadow and Wild Kingdom), director of the NonFiction Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, and a Fellow of the NYIH.
LAWRENCE WESCHLER, concurrently director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, is the author of such recent books as Vermeer in Bosnia; Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences; Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (30 Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin); and True to Life (25 Years of Conversations with David Hockney).
THE NEW YORK INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES AT NYU was established in 1976 to promote the exchange of ideas between academics, professionals, politicians, diplomats, writers, journalists, musicians, painters, and other artists in New York City--and between all of them and the city. It currently comprises 220 fellows. Throughout the year, the NYIH organizes numerous public events, including performances, readings, and symposia.
For further information about this event or the Institute, please visit <http://www.nyih.as.nyu.edu>www.nyih.as.nyu.edu or
contact the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU at <mailto:nyih.info@nyu.edu>nyih.info@nyu.edu or 212.998.2101.
